'Repeated, Renewed, or Served Up Again'

On July 1, 1727, during his final visit to England, Jonathan Swift was staying at Alexander Pope’s home in Twickenham, where he wrote to his friend and future biographer Thomas Sheridan. Swift asked him to copy the verses he had written for Esther Johnson, known as Stella, who had collected and transcribed Swift’s poems to prepare them for publication. Not surprisingly, the poem is titled “To Stella, Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems,” and may date from as early as 1720. Here is an excerpt:

 

“So Maevius, when he drain’d his skull

To celebrate some suburb trull,

His similes in order set,

And every crambo he could get;

Had gone through all the common-places

Worn out by wits, who rhyme on faces;

Before he could his poem close,

The lovely nymph had lost her nose.”

 

Maevius was a poetaster from the age of Augustus Caesar who appears in Virgil’s Eclogues and whose name became synonymous with bad poetry. Crambo stumped me. In his edition of Swift’s Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983), Pat Rogers identifies it as “a popular game in which one player challenges another to find a rhyme. . . . The implication here is ‘threadbare, familiar rhyme, striving for ingenuity.’” In other words, worse than conventional, unimaginative rhyming, as in June/moon. More like proboscis/colossus.

 

The first definition in the OED is “a game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to which each of the others has to find a rhyme.” This sounds a little like a cutting contest among jazz musicians, and might be a lot of fun with the proper crowd. “To win at a parlor game like crambo, / It’s best to make your rhymes like Rambo.” Or some such. The Dictionary cites Swift’s poem in its second definition: “rhyme, rhyming: said in contempt.”

 

In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson bluntly dismisses hopes of determining the word’s origin: “a cant word, probably without etymology.” The OED refers us to another word, crambe, from the Greek for “cabbage,” usually in reference to the Latin phrase crambe repetīta cabbage repeated, renewed, or served up again . . . any distasteful repetition.” Few poets today can be accused of crambo because they don’t even try to rhyme. With apologies to Yeats: “All things can tempt me from writing free verse: / ‘Swift’s Epitaph,’ ‘Coole Park’ and ‘Adam’s Curse.’”